Wayne M. O'Leary

Controlling the Narrative

The congressional midterm elections are barely over and already
the mainstream media, which profess to hate political spin, are
placing their own spin on the proceedings. Political pundits all over
the airwaves and print prognosticators throughout the
mass-circulation newspapers and magazines have developed almost in
unison what contemporary journalism calls a "narrative" (a story
line) of the results. As they view it, liberalism didn't win and
neither did left-leaning politicians; instead, the victory belonged
to centrism and the forces of nonideological moderation.

The facts say otherwise. While the elections certainly didn't
bring in a new class of officeholders with socially radical views --
no advocates of sweeping gun control, unlimited gay marriage, or
expanding abortion rights -- neither did they herald the arrival of
the sort of center-right Democrats beloved by the media. Oh, Joe
Lieberman and a few stray Blue Dogs will be back, expounding their
Republican lite philosophy and seeking bipartisan coalitions in favor
of the status quo. But Lieberman will be more than balanced off in
the Senate by the likes of Sherrod Brown, the firebrand Ohio
Democrat, and Bernie Sanders, the (dare we say it) socialist
independent from Vermont, who will caucus with the Democrats.

What the newly-elected senators have in common (and what the
media mostly missed) is that they are, with few exceptions,
supporters of economic populism and working-class aspirations. This
includes not only obvious center-left figures like Sherrod Brown and
Bernie Sanders, but also more centrist-appearing newcomers like Jon
Tester of Montana, James Webb of Virginia and Robert Casey Jr. of
Pennsylvania. The Senate's Democratic Class of 2006 can be expected
to hold corporate America's collective feet to the fire on a number
of issues, including trade, tax, and wage policy, and to put the
brakes on any administration notions of entitlement privatization.
The new House Democrats are a bit harder to read, but according to
Public Citizen's Global Trade Watch, over two-dozen of them are
anti-free traders who replaced pro-NAFTA representatives. That's as
good an indicator as any.

From the start, however, the media mavens focused their attention
almost exclusively on those new members of Congress, mostly from red
states, who seemed to fit the established election narrative, if only
superficially. Senate winners who didn't conform to the narrative,
notably Brown and Sanders, as well as Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode
Island, were given short shrift or ignored completely. Whitehouse
campaigned like an old New Dealer and dismantled a Republican
moderate (Lincoln Chafee) of the sort the media love. As a result, he
was barely mentioned on election night or after. The same treatment
was accorded Brown, a crusader against free trade, who ran from the
left and won with a textbook economic-populist campaign that,
according to the conventional wisdom, can't succeed.

Perhaps the strangest case of neglect was that of Bernie Sanders,
who carried Vermont overwhelmingly despite (or perhaps because of)
being an unapologetic democratic socialist, the first ever elected to
the US Senate. Shouldn't that have been a political story worth
covering in depth? Apparently not, because it didn't fit the
preconceived media narrative of moderation triumphant. Instead, there
was an endless journalistic romance with Tennessee's Harold Ford, who
did everything the media said a Democrat had to do to win in the
Heartland: He campaigned as a warmed-over Republican, quoting the
Bible and taking hard-line conservative stands on social issues and
national defense. Despite projecting an image as a southern-fried Joe
Lieberman, Ford lost anyway. But never fear, say the anointed members
of the commentariat, he has a great future in politics. He's a
moderate, after all, and the main message of the midterms, the
establishmentarian Economist tells us, is that "America is weary of
polarization."

On the other hand, perhaps America is really tired of a
generation of conservative governance and ready to try something
different. The domestic program already outlined by the Democratic
leadership (increasing the minimum wage, revamping parts of the
Medicare drug benefit, ending fast-track trade authority, instituting
congressional ethics reform, terminating a variety of corporate tax
breaks) sets the right tone. It's not overly ambitious -- there's no
mention of national health insurance, for instance -- but without a
Democrat in the White House, there's only so much the new
congressional majority can accomplish. Any fundamental, far-reaching
progressive legislation will face a Bush veto that can't be
overridden, and nothing will happen on Iraq unless the president
wants it to happen. Consequently, much of what the Pelosi-Reid
Congress does will of necessity be symbolic and aimed at building
toward 2008, when a raft of vulnerable Republican Senate seats
(two-thirds of those up for renewal) could change hands, along with
the presidency.

In the meantime, the slim Democratic majority will have to
contend with a harping mass media constantly calling, as the
Washington Post did recently, for "bipartisan cooperation." That will
be in keeping with the punditocracy's consensus election narrative of
a centrist mandate. It can't be forgotten that most of the
communications network, print and electronic, is corporate in nature
and in tune with much of what the Bush administration pursued over
the last six years, especially on domestic economic policy. The days
of the "liberal" press are long gone, right-wing conspiracy theories
notwithstanding. This is a national media that will be suspicious at
best and hostile at worst toward any broad-ranging progressive
political program.

Committed progressives will have to be tactically astute for the
next two years, recognizing the tenuous political position they hold
in Congress and being ever vigilant about overreaching. In the short
run, the game will be about perception and appearance, and providing
neither the political right nor the skeptical media with any easy
openings to short-circuit the nascent progressive revival. This means
making progressivism work and achieving a record of practical
accomplishment, with an emphasis on doable reforms. Without carefully
laying the groundwork, no long-range triumph of progressive values
will be possible.

Above all, the progressive community needs to counteract the
emerging centrist narrative of the 2006 elections with a more
truthful alternative narrative. The Democratic victory was really one
of political "moderation" only in a stylistic sense. In substance, it
was the unqualified triumph of a revived center-left politics
enlivened by an invigorating dash of long-dormant economic populism.
That's what voters endorsed, not some directionless and sterile
bipartisanship.